Our comment on the awards ceremony for the entire 2024 edition of the Cannes Film Festival
And so from today Selena Gomez can display a Palme d’Or for best female performance at home. It is the most unexpected outcome of an edition of the Cannes Film Festival which, for the first time since the MeToo movement began in 2017 and the process of reviewing the position and role of women in industry and films has undergone a ‘accelerated, was dominated by women seriously and not speciously.
This which has just ended was the first edition in which the push by the organization to put women at the center was a minority force and instead it was the best films (and some of the worst), first of all, that had At the center are women and in particular the female body, looked at in many different ways. Which is what a festival, ideally, should offer: a multiplicity of perspectives on a topical subject. And the female body is a very powerful negotiation ground for meanings of our times. It took a while but we finally arrived at an edition in which, remotely, the films discussed it.
At the beginning of the festival, before seeing the films, we said that judging from the selection, that is on paper, it seemed like a dull and subdued edition. It was not so. On the contrary. It was one of the few editions of Cannes in which the very bad films, the ones which are hard to understand how they could have ended up in the competition, were few (perhaps only The Girl With The Needle), most of it was good and we saw some gigantic movies. That all this arrived in a year that on paper seemed unexceptional, therefore from filmmakers who are not all already in the “master” phase, is even more of a joy.
At least 9 films (WildDiamond, The Girl With The Needle, Parthenope, The Substance, All We Imagine As Light, Emilia Perez, Anora, Marcello Mio, Motel Destiny) have been studies on women’s bodies, some more didactic than others (Wild Diamonds and his fake body in a fake life), some subversives (The Substancewhich he associates with the naked body of Margaret Qualley the sense of disgust for body fluids), some empowering (Anorathan to the naked body of Mikey Madison associates a power that goes beyond everything), some traditional (Parthenopein which the body of Celestial Gate is admired for his beauty) and others who completely revise everything we think about certain bodies (Emilia Perez and its transsexual drug trafficking boss).
These and many other films in the selection will be some of those that will dominate the next year, that will cause the most talk and that will play the most important roles in becoming a piece of cinema history. And for the first time in a long time there is a Palme d’Or that won’t give festivals bad publicity. Anora it is a film that has a very powerful commercial side, a comedy with a demonic pace and devastating humour. At the same time, it is also a film that will be completely new to many viewers. It is not absolutely, those who follow research cinema more closely will notice how it brings together with exceptional balance many changes in the language seen in cinema in recent decades, from the metropolitan way of filming that the same Baker had experimented in Tangerinesto the frenzy of the story of the Safdieup to the observer character, the sponge of feelings that seems external to the story and we do not expect to have a centrality, as in some films Xavier Dolan.
And it will be great publicity for the festival too Emilia Perez, perhaps the most subversive film of the entire edition and therefore of the year. With two prizes and a capital of attention to exploit, Audiard takes the old cinema idea of mixing genres and the slightly less old but still digestible idea of using B movie plots and ideas to make A films, and turns an unthinkable story into a film of real feelings, which brings together both his cinema of impossible-to-remove pasts with the first truly insightful study of sexual transition. Real and heartfelt precisely because behind allegory. A film that suddenly sweeps away all underground cinema, playing on its own terrain, but with the weapons (and capabilities) of A-series cinema.
Finally, although there is some regret about a marginal premium, it will be there The Seed Of The Sacred Figthe film by Mohammad Rasoulof, which deals with politics with very simple and direct themes, within the usual, monstrous Iranian cinema. Screenplay with an inexorable mechanism, characters written and interpreted very well and a rhythm that never comes from the action but from the unfolding of events. It was thought it could be an obvious (and fair) Palme d’Or, but no. But it will certainly be a film that will have a good year ahead of it.
After several disappointing years, the Cannes festival, perhaps also thanks to the good performances at the Oscars of the non-American films selected in past years, has rediscovered an attractive capacity for films with more possibilities and above all for American cinema or more generally in foreign languages. English (this year every day between competition and out of competition there was one who stood out). This at least in the official selection. Little or nothing however seems to have been noticed in the Critics’ Week and in the Quinzaine des Cinéastes, which do not seem to find peace, form and quadrature. The second, in particular, after the end of the stellar management of Edouard Waintrop (2012-2018), was handled worse than the other. The section benefited from it Un Certain Regard which is now the one in which the most interesting debuts or films are found among those that do not have (on paper) sufficient appeal for the competition, but it is clear that the festival needs a Fortnight strong.
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